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Recent reviews published at BrothersJudd.comen-usCopyright BrothersJuddSat, 25 May 2019 10:36:47 ESTReview of The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (William McCants)<blockquote>The Islamic Stateâs brutality and its insistence on apocalypse now and caliphate now set it apart from al-Qaeda, of which it was a part until 2014. Weâre used to thinking of al-Qaedaâs leader Osama bin Laden as the baddest of the bad, but the Islamic State is worse. Bin Laden tamped down messianic fervor and sought popular Muslim support; the return of the early Islamic empire, or caliphate, was a distant dream. In contrast, the Islamic Stateâs members fight and govern by their own version of Machiavelliâs dictum âIt is far safer to be feared than loved.â They stir messianic fervor rather than suppress it. They want Godâs kingdom now rather than later. This is not Bin Ladenâs jihad.<br><br>
In some ways, the difference between Bin Laden and the Islamic Stateâs leaders is generational. For Bin Ladenâs cohort, the apocalypse wasnât a great recruiting pitch. Governments in the Middle East two decades ago were more stable, and sectarianism was more subdued. It was better to recruit by calling to arms against corruption and tyranny than against the Antichrist. Today, though, the apocalyptic recruiting pitch makes more sense. Titanic upheavals convulse the region in the very places mentioned in the prophecies. Sunnis and Shiâa are at war, both appealing to their own versions of prophecies to justify their politics.<br><br>
The French scholar of Muslim apocalypticism, Jean-Pierre Filiu, has argued that most modern Sunni Muslims viewed apocalyptic thinking with suspicion before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. It was something the Shiâa or the conspiracy-addled fringe obsessed over, not right-thinking Sunnis. Sure, the Sunni fringe wrote books about the fulfillment of Islamic prophecies. They mixed Muslim apocalyptic villains in with UFOs, the Bermuda triangle, Nostradamus and the prognostications of evangelical Christians, all to reveal the hidden hand of the international Jew, the Antichrist, who cunningly shaped world events. But the books were commercial duds.<br><br>
The U.S. invasion of Iraq and the stupendous violence that followed dramatically increased the Sunni publicâs appetite for apocalyptic explanations of a world turned upside down. A spate of bestsellers put the United States at the center of the End-Times drama, a new âRomeâ careering throughout the region in a murderous stampede to prevent violence on its own shores. The main antagonists of the End of Days, the Jews, were now merely supporting actors. Even conservative Sunni clerics who had previously tried to tamp down messianic fervor couldnât help but conclude that âthe triple union constituted by the Antichrist, the Jews, and the new Crusadersâ had joined forces âto destroy the Muslims.â<br><br>
The Iraq war also changed apocalyptic discourse in the global jihadist movement. The languid apocalypticism of bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri now had to contend with the urgent apocalypticism of Abu Musâab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and his immediate successors. Iraq, the site of a prophesied bloodbath between true Muslims and false, was engulfed in a sectarian civil war. As Zarqawi saw it, the Shiâa had united with the Jews and Christians under the banner of the Antichrist to fight against the Sunnis. The Final Hour must be approaching, to be heralded by the rebirth of the caliphate, the Islamic empire that had disappeared and whose return was prophesied.<br><br>
Because of the impending Final Hour, Zarqawiâs successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, quickly dissolved al-Qaeda in Iraq in order to establish the Islamic State in 2006. Masri rushed to found the State because he believed the Mahdi, the Muslim savior, would come within the year. To his thinking, the caliphate needed to be in place to help the Mahdi fight the final battles of the apocalypse. Anticipating the imminent conquest of major Islamic cities as foretold in the prophecies, he ordered his commanders in the field to conquer the whole of Iraq to prepare for the Mahdiâs coming and was convinced they would succeed in three months. The Islamic Stateâs forces fanned out across the country, only to be recalled a week later because they were spread too thin. When those close to Masri criticized him for making strategic decisions on an apocalyptic timetable, Masri retorted, âthe Mahdi will come any day.â<br><br>
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/isis-jihad-121525#ixzz4A9dZGI7F ">-ESSAY: How ISIL Out-Terrorized Bin Laden</a>:
Brutality and doomsday visions have made ISIL the worldâs most feared terrorist group (William McCants, August 19, 2015, Politico)</blockquote><br><br>
<div><a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/16/present-at-the-creation/?utm_content=buffer0f331&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter.com&amp;utm_campaign=buffer">Present at the Creation</a> : The never-told-before story of the meeting that led to the creation of ISIS, as explained by an Islamic State insider. (HARALD DOORNBOS, JENAN MOUSSA, AUGUST 16, 2016, Foreign Policy)</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="margin: 0 0 0 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;"><div>In mid-April 2013, Abu Ahmad noticed a dark red-brown car pull up in front of the headquarters of Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen (MSM), a Syrian jihadi group led by Abu al-Atheer, in the northern Syrian town of Kafr Hamra.</div><div><br /></div><div>One of Abu Ahmad's friends, a jihadi commander, walked up to him and whispered in his ear: "Look carefully inside the vehicle."</div><div><br /></div><div>The car was nothing special: not new enough to attract attention but not a jalopy, either. It wasn't armored and it did not have a license plate.</div><div><br /></div><div>Inside the vehicle sat four men. Abu Ahmad recognized none of them. The man sitting behind the driver wore a folded black balaclava like a cap. On top of it was a black shawl, falling over his shoulders. He had a long beard. Except for the driver, all occupants held small machine guns on their laps.</div><div><br /></div><div>Abu Ahmad could see that there was no extra security at the gate of the headquarters. As usual, just two armed fighters stood guard in front of the entrance. The internet connection at the headquarters was working normally. To him, there didn't seem to be any sign that today was different from any other day.</div><div><br /></div><div>But after the four men got out of the car and disappeared into the headquarters, the same jihadi commander walked up to him again and whispered "You have just seen Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi."</div><div><br /></div><div>Since 2010, Baghdadi had been the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), al Qaeda's affiliate in that war-torn country. According to Baghdadi's own account, he sent Abu Muhammad al-Jolani as his representative to Syria in 2011, instructing him to set up the Nusra Front to wage jihad there. Until the beginning of 2013, ISI and Nusra worked together. But Baghdadi wasn't satisfied. He wanted to combine al Qaeda's Iraqi and Syrian affiliates to create one outfit that stretched across both countries -- with him, of course, as the leader.</div><div><br /></div><div>Every morning, for five days in a row, the red-brown car dropped off Baghdadi and his deputy, Haji Bakr, at the headquarters of MSM in Kafr Hamra. Before sunset, the same car with the same driver would pick them up from the headquarters and take Baghdadi to a secret location for the night. The next morning, the car would come back to drop off Baghdadi and Bakr.</div><div><br /></div><div>"The sheikh is here to convince everybody to abandon Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Jolani," one of the participants in the talks told Abu Ahmad. "Instead, everybody should join him and unite under the banner of ISIS, which soon will become a state."</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Baghdadi, however, faced one big problem in realizing his goal. The assembled emirs explained to the ISI chief that most of them had sworn allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's chosen successor and the leader of al Qaeda. How could they suddenly abandon Zawahiri and al Qaeda and switch to Baghdadi?</div><div><br /></div><div>According to Abu Ahmad, they asked Baghdadi during the meeting: Have you pledged allegiance to Zawahiri?</div><div><br /></div><div>Baghdadi told them that he had indeed pledged allegiance, but hadn't declared it publicly, per Zawahiri's request. But Baghdadi assured the men that he was acting under the command of the al Qaeda leader.</div><div><br /></div><div>The jihadi leaders had no way to check if this claim was true. Zawahiri was perhaps the most difficult person in the world to contact -- he had not been seen in public in years, and is still in hiding, most probably somewhere in Pakistan or Afghanistan.</div><div><br /></div><div>With Zawahiri unable to mediate the dispute himself, the jihadi leaders had to make up their own minds. If Baghdadi acted on behalf of Zawahiri, there was no doubt they had to follow the order to join ISIS. But if Baghdadi was freelancing, his plan to take over Nusra and other groups was an act of mutiny. It would divide al Qaeda and create fitna, or strife, between all the jihadi armies.</div><div><br /></div><div>So the commanders gave Baghdadi a conditional allegiance. "They said to him: 'If it is true what you are saying, then we will support you,'" Abu Ahmad told us.</div><div><br /></div><div>Baghdadi also spoke about the creation of an Islamic state in Syria. It was important, he said, because Muslims needed to have a dawla, or state. Baghdadi wanted Muslims to have their own territory, from where they could work and eventually conquer the world.</div><div><br /></div><div>The participants differed greatly about the idea of creating a state in Syria. Throughout its existence, al Qaeda had worked in the shadows as a nonstate actor. It did not openly control any territory, instead committing acts of violence from undisclosed locations. Remaining a clandestine organization had a huge advantage: It was very difficult for the enemy to find, attack, or destroy them. But by creating a state, the jihadi leaders argued during the meeting, it would be extremely easy for the enemy to find and attack them. A state with a defined territory and institutions was a sitting duck.</div><div><br /></div><div>Abu al-Atheer, the MSM emir, had already told his fighters before the arrival of Baghdadi that he was very much against declaring a state. "Some people are talking about this unwise idea," Atheer told his men. "What kind of madman declares a state during this time of war?!"</div><div><br /></div><div>Omar al-Shishani, the leader of the Chechen jihadis, was equally hesitant about the idea of creating a state, said Abu Ahmad. There was a reason why Osama bin Laden had been hiding all these years -- to avoid getting killed by the Americans. Declaring a state would be an open invitation to the enemy to attack them.</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>As <a href="http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1604/">The Looming Tower</a> by Lawrence Wright is the singular text on Al Qaeda in the run-up to 9-11, so <a href="http://us.macmillan.com/theisisapocalypse/williammccants">The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State</a> by William McCants is the outstanding book on Baghdadi and company.</div><div><br /></div><div>Obviously a group that has caused as much death, misery and Mayhem as ISIS has to be taken seriously, but an account of its history and ideology can't help but be comical. &nbsp;Nevermind how frequently Mr. McCants portrait of a rising jihadi and the imminent threat he represents ends with the character being killed by a US missile attack, consider instead just the impossibility of ISIS ever realizing its goals. We can start with the one the Al Qaeda skeptics enunciated above and continue from there:</div><div><br /></div><div>(1) In order to be a legitimate potential political alternative, the jihadists have to demonstrate that they can take and hold or create a state. &nbsp;But the attempt does nothing, in reality, but to make it easier for the US to acquire targets. &nbsp;In essence, none of the public structure of a state can be brought into existence without our proceeding to destroy it.</div><div><br /></div><div>(2) On the other hand, the inability to institute a caliphate--a state run by the jihadis' notions of totalitarian Islamicist governance--delegitimizes the group and its message.</div><div><br /></div><div>(3) Suppose, however, that reality were radically different and the US and the West (and the Turks and the Iranians, etc.) all ceased paying attention to the Arabian Penninsula and allowed the Salafi radicals to establish their caliphate. &nbsp;As Mr. McCants recounts, the legitimacy of that regime would depend on its capacity to deliver decent lives to those living under its rule. &nbsp;And, of course, it would have to exceed the capacity of rival regimes--the Western model--to deliver prosperity, security, justice, etc., in order to demonstrate its superiority. &nbsp;As a slew of other isms have amply proven, there are no real competitors here at the End of History.</div><div><br /></div><div>(4) Legitimacy would also depend on Muslims choosing to live under such a regime, which they stubbornly refuse to do--taking up arms against it or fleeing to the hated West. Indeed, ISIS has been forced to use such brutal methods to repress the locals that it tends to undermine its own claims to representing the popular will, fails to govern in conformity with the standards required of the genuine Caliphate and makes the prospect of its success repellent to even those Sunni Muslims it is ostensibly trying to appeal to.</div><div><br /></div><div>(5) &nbsp;Nor is it just the methods that ISIS employs that are problematic; it is also the men wielding those methods. &nbsp;The military forces of ISIS are dependent on former Ba'athist officers, ignorant foreign fighters attracted to the war for non-religious reasons, and various and sundry psycho and sociopaths. &nbsp;The resulting brutality and corruption are hardly consistent with the idea of establishing a religious utopia. And the presence of non-Arabs is a tough sell in what are still tribal regions. Even if Allah were sending an army to help the faithful restore the Caliphate, this surely isn't the best he could do, is it?</div><div><br /></div><div>(6) And here we get to the theological problems that ISIS faces. &nbsp;It's not just the inferior quality of the armed forces and their leadership, but the whole movement depends on the idea that it is being led by the Allah-sent Mahdi who is preparing the world for the End Times. &nbsp;It is sufficient for us as Christians that this is nothing more than heresy and that there is no possibility of a Mahdi to recognize the futility of the whole enterprise. &nbsp;But, taken on its own terms, the declaration by ISIS that the Mahdi is here and the Caliphate restored requires--as a purely theological matter--that they succeed. &nbsp;A Mahdi and a Caliphate that are being pummeled as relentlessly as those in Syria today stand as a rebuke to the theology itself. &nbsp;The Apocalypse is, obviously, not supposed to result in Christians, Jews, Shi'a, Alawites, Kurds, Persians, Turks and the rest standing victorious on the battlefield while the jihadi lower their black battle flag and run for cover.</div><div><br /></div><div>Taken as a whole, these weaknesses make it clear that while the Salafi jihadists were a terribly destructive force, briefly, and will likely remain a terrorist threat for some time, they are not and never were a serious geo-political threat. &nbsp;There can be no Clash of Civilizations where only one exists.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
<p>Grade: A</p><div class="feedflare">
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Sun, 21 Aug 2016 00:00:01 ESThttp://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1882Review of Brilliant Orange (David Winner)<br><blockquote>Space is the unique defining element of Dutch football.<br><br>
<b>-David Winner</b>, <u>Brilliant Orange</u></blockquote><br><br>
If this book were just about the way Dutch teams--especially Ajax and the national team--played soccer in a discrete time period, it would be marginally interesting. But the fact that the greatest player of that era, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Cruyff">Johann Cruyff</a>, made the best team of this era--Barcelona and consequently the Spanish national team--in the image of those Dutch teams means that it remains an extremely useful text for understanding the game as it is played at the highest levels today.
Perhaps the easiest way to explain the main premise of this great essay extended into a good book is with two images from artists Mr. Winner draws upon:<br><br>
One from the Baroque painter <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Jansz._Saenredam">Pieter Jansz. Saenredam</a><br><br>:
<img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Pieter_Janszoon_Saenredam_Interior_of_the_Church_of_St_Bavo_in_Haarlem.jpg">
And one from contemporary photographer Hans Van Der Meer<br><br>
<img src="http://www.emptykingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Picture-39.png"><br><br>
What these two images--distant in time--have in common is that while ostensibly of a church and a soccer game they are, instead, surreptitious depictions of open space. We celebrate Dutch art primarily in the form of portraiture, but the people in these pictures are incidental.<br><br>
It is Mr. Winner's compelling assertion that Dutch culture has primarily been shaped by the physical contours of a land mass largely reclaimed from the sea, which features wide open flats punctuated by sudden rises of man-made physical structures. As in the pictures above, it is the space surrounding them that created Dutchness. And, in turn, the great innovations of Dutch soccer trace to their insights about utilizing the spaces of the field. <br><br>
The Total Football concepts that they created--or at least adopted and ruthlessly exploited as no one had previously--included spreading balls out wide--into areas of the field that are less well-defended than the middle--which pulled apart defenses--creating openings in the middle of the field--both of which had the effect of giving their own players more room in which to operate. On the other side of the coin, they pressed high up field with their defenders in order to reduce the amount of space in which their opponents could function. The combination and the frequent passing and sense of fluid motion that these strategies create made them much beloved and--like Barcelona today--made even folks who don't root for the teams appreciate the stylishness of their play. As an ethos about the game, it holds that aesthetically pleasing play is more important than winning.<br><br>
While the book is somewhat disjointed, sometimes self-contradictory, and would benefit from far more illustrations, it is a terrific read on both the game and on the Dutch people. But perhaps the greatest shortcoming of the book is the failure to explore why the Dutch and those who follow the tenets of total football, didn't/don't make better use of the most important space in the game--the air.<br><br>
The ideal goal in total football gets walked into the net, because of sharp passing on the ground. It is not the product of a great shot, never a mere rebound, and, definitively, not headed in. But if the Dutch genius is to utilize the space you are given, then the focus really ought to be on headers. Consider first of all that <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Health/story?id=2998245&page=1">the Dutch are the world's tallest people</a>--the primary space that they occupy and could exploit is above the rest of our heads. One of the first things you teach a big man in basketball is that when he catches the ball he should keep it aloft. As soon as he brings it down he effectively makes smaller players his equal and gives away his natural advantage. Likewise, Peter Crouch's forehead is a foot higher than Jermaine Defoe's, but their feet rest at the same level.<br><br>
Consider also that when two teams are in front of one's goal there are 42 feet on the ground, but only 21 heads in the air. There is just more room up there. And the path of a ball sent in from the wings in search of a teammate will therefore have an unobstructed path through the air but must thread through the thicket of legs on the ground. <br><br>
Next consider that when you press up field defensively you leave acres of space behind you, inviting the counterattack, all the more effective if you've thrown your fullbacks forward on attack. Compacting one end of the field necessarily expands the other. And once your central defenders are facing their own goal and racing back to it you're in trouble.<br><br>
Moreover, the style you play determines what type of players you have on the field. Eschewing headers means you don't have big men up front and emphasizing mobility at the back may mean you don't have big men in defense either. Barcelona and Spain have recently pushed the theories of their game so far to the extreme that they don't even play with strikers sometimes. After all, why play a guy in front of goal if you aren't interested in getting the ball to him anyway?<br><br>
The result of all this and of the vulnerabilities that the style imposes were most glaringly exposed by Jose Mourinho in the Champion' League semi-final between his Inter Milan and Barcelona several years ago. Inter won the second leg despite having possession of the ball for just 16% of the game. Barcelona enjoyed possession for possession sake, but lost track of the fact that the point of the game is to score and win. Against a side that packed in its defense in front of the goal--parking the bus, as it's called--Barcelona could hold the ball but could do nothing constructive with it. And because its personnel are chosen on the basis of one style, it had no Plan B to resort to when possession failed to produce chances.<br><br>
The great tactical writer, Jonathan Wilson, told the following anecdote in <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2010/may/12/the-question-important-possession">his story about that game</a>:<br><br>
<blockquote>What Inter showed last week, is that there are specific cases in which a radical disregard for possession can succeed. At Milan, Arrigo Sacchi got fed up of players moaning about his obsession with team shape, and so proved its worth with a simple drill. "I convinced [Ruud] Gullit and [Marco] Van Basten by telling them that five organised players would beat 10 disorganised ones," he said. "And I proved it to them. I took five players: Giovanni Galli in goal, [Mauro] Tassotti, [Paolo] Maldini, [Alesandro] Costacurta and [Franco] Baresi. They had 10 players: Gullit, Van Basten, [Frank] Rijkaard, [Pietro Paolo] Virdis, [Alberigo] Evani, [Carlo] Ancelotti, [Angelo] Colombo, [Roberto] Donadoni, [Christian] Lantignotti and [Graziano] Mannari. They had 15 minutes to score against my five players, the only rule was that if we won possession or they lost the ball, they had to start over from 10 metres inside their own half. I did this all the time and they never scored. Not once."</blockquote>
The bizarre thing is that while this sort of strategy is just as much driven by an appreciation of spatial relationships and requires enormous tactical discipline it is dismissed as cynical or as anti-football. It is moaned that such play allows "inferior" teams to beat "superior" ones. Might it not be fairer to say that practitioners of the Dutch style have simply misunderstood spatial realities rather than having mastered them?<p>Grade: A</p><div class="feedflare">
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Sun, 22 Sep 2013 00:00:01 ESThttp://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1830Review of America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century-Why America's Greatest Days Are Yet to Come (James Bennett)<br>It will seem odd to make the following argument in a review of a book that opens by celebrating American exceptionalism, but the clearest way to understand our current politics is to expand our view and consider the whole Anglosphere. This last term was popularized by Mr. Bennett, so perhaps we're not too far afield after all. At any rate, we in the English-speaking world have a certain uniform dynamic to our politics nowadays that means we can understand ourselves better by looking at each other. And when we do consider the whole, it becomes apparent that we are all groping and stumbling towards the adoption of what has variously been called Compassionate Conservatism, New Labour, New Democrat policies, but can really all be boiled down to the Third Way.<br><br>
Speaking broadly, the First Way was the rather nakedly capitalistic system pursued until early in the 20th Century. It helped to advance England and America--in particular--to the forefont of industrialization, technology, and business organization globally, but it left the citizenry vulnerable to general economic downturns and particular personal crises like unemployment, illness, old age and death. Because democracy was another vital facet of the Anglosphere, politics gradually had to respond to the demand for a social safety net and the Second Way gathered strength, given a final push to dominance by the spectacular failure of capitalism that produced the Great Depression. If the First Way was premised on personal freedom and free markets, the Second Way was premised on literal social security. It promised a certain level of benefits as a floor below which we would not allow individuals to sink, even if it meant limiting markets, individuals and businesses in ways that had never been permissible previously.<br><br>
Sadly for its proponents, the anti-capitalist nature of the Second Way proved so damaging to the economy that we arrived at a point--in the 1970's--where the promised benefits could no longer be funded from the profits of business. By the mid-80s, we'd seen the elections of Margaret Thatcher in England, Ronald Reagan in America, Brian Mulroney in Canada, and even Helmut Kohl in Germany and Yasuhiro Nakasone in Japan. Pro-capitalist conservatism, which had been consigned to the ash heap of history in the 60s, had risen across the West, tasked with the revival of economies and the defeat of the quintessential Second Way regime, the USSR. <br><br>
For the most part this new conservatism did not describe the solution it was adopting to the Second Way problem, indeed, it often seemed like old conservatism, just reacting against the Second Way and pining nostalgically for the First. But there was a new model for it to borrow from, a political-social experiment that happened in the least likely of places, Chile. Faced with a deteriorating economy, Augusto Pinochet had invited the Chicago Boys--<a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/7743">Milton Friedman disciples from the University of Chicago</a>--to come help his government initiate free market reforms, These soon made Chile's a uniquely dynamic economy for Latin America. But, as important as the reforms to the economy were the reforms to the social welfare system, which shifted from a focus on benefits to a focus on contributions. In essence, Chile began the great Third Way experiment of <a href="http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/chiles-social-security-lesson-us">having individuals fund their own social safety net</a>. Nor was it just a matter of shifting from defined benefit to defined contribution, it also meant taking advantage of capitalism to allow these social security funds to be invested in markets and exploit the growth opportunities they provide.<br><br>
On the Anglosphere's periphery, New Zealand and Australia had also experimented with such reforms, but it was Margaret Thatcher--quite clearly influenced by the Chilean example--who <a href="http://www.pensions-insight.co.uk/did-margaret-thatcher-kill-defined-benefit-pensions/1471220.article">introduced a personalized retirement system in Britain</a> and really goosed the transition. Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich's Welfare Reforms; George W. Bush's <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2011/08/05/flat-medicare-drug-premiums-show-that-choice-and-competition-work/">Medicare Drug Benefit</a>, HSA rules, housing vouchers, NCLB vouchers and push for personalized Social Security accounts; and Barrack Obama's health care mandate all pushed our politics in the same direction. Meanwhile, Tony Blair won election by being more Thatcher-like than the Tories, as David Cameron was more Blair than Gordon Brown was, as W was more Clinton-like than Al Gore, as Stephen Harper and Benjamin Netanyahu presented themselves as Bush-like reformers, as the current squabbling among Australian leaders on the Left can be reduced to <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/kevin-rudds-tampa-his-plan-to-redraw-the-political-map/story-e6frg74x-1226682223950">which is best able to cast the party as a more effective version of the Conservatives</a>. Everywhere, the contest is to be identified with the politics of the Third Way--bring First Way mechanisms to bear in order to improve Second Way programs--although internal party politics prevent being openly identified in this way. Indeed, there are so few substantive policy differences between Left and Right in the Anglosphere today that only party partisanship divides them. So aspiring leaders have to pretend to differences that don't exist. And all the while, throughout the Anglosphere we all just keep moving towards more globalized free market economies and more contribution driven social welfare networks.<br><br>
The time is ripe then for a bold and clear statement that clarifies where we have been and where we are headed and provides a platform for one party or another--or both--to run on and move us further in this direction. America 3.0 comes the closest to fulfilling this demand of any book I've read. But, sadly, it falls short, one suspects, for just the reasons stated above.<br><br>
In the first instance, the book offers a tremendously lucid and useful discussion of the unique set of circumstances and influences that produced Anglo-Saxon culture. In fact, they play up the Saxon contribution to the point where we might ask if we aren't really citizens of the Saxonsphere. You must read the whole thing, but we can pluck out of it the central Saxon characteristics that the authors celebrate:<br><br>
<blockquote>*They were free people. [...]<br><br>
*They owned property individually, not communally, and not as families. [...]<br><br>
*They traced their lineages through both the male and female line. [...] As a result extended families or clans did not have collective legal rights, or any recognized political role. <br><br>
*They usually worked together by voluntary association in peacetime, and under coercive authority mainly in wartime.<br><br>
*In government, they had local rule. [...]<br><br>
*They restricted the authority of their kings. [...]<br><br>
*They preferred living in the country, or in dispersed homes, rather than living in large towns.<br><br>
*They engaged in money transactions.</blockquote><br><br>
What's important about this "toolkit" is that, for all the changes to our country and culture, these influences still run deep within it. This means that our future is likely to be shaped by them and a successful politics should counsel policies be in accord with them.<br><br>
As to those policies, much of what the authors predict seems spot on. They advocate/predict, bringing government budgets into balance, abolishing income taxes, decentralizing workplaces and academics, devolving the current strong national government towards smaller confederations of like-minded regions of states (like New England, except for New Hampshire, or the Pacific States), leaving more of social policy to the states to settle for themselves rather than the Court imposing solutions nationwide, and reducing American involvement in the internal affairs of foreign nations. Most, if not all, of this seems inevitable.<br><br>
But there's an elephant in the room that they largely ignore, and it leaves a gaping hole in the book. For obviously the social safety net and the set of reforms we can adopt to make it more fiscally stable and financially lucrative must be a major theme of our future politics. And not only are Third Way reforms entirely consistent with those Saxon values they outline but they are suggested by some of the other reforms they advocate and trends that they identify.<br><br>
First, and foremost, the authors kind of bury their own lede when they state but fail to fully follow-up on the following revolutionary insight: <br>
<blockquote>[T]he entire concept of a "job" is going away. At the time of the Founding, most Americans did not have jobs. There is no reason to think most Americans in the future will have jobs, primarily working at the direction of others employing capital owned by others. Americans are not yet remotely prepared for this shift, either institutionally, or psychologically.</blockquote><br>
That is certainly true, but the absence of policy proposals to deal with the problems that flow from that reality suggests the authors aren't prepared yet either. For instance, left unspoken in the discussion of ending income taxes and moving to consumption taxes is that the main policy reason for this is to favor, or even force, savings, which is vital to a personalized social safety net.<br><br>
An even more glaring omission comes in their otherwise entertaining vision of life in 2040. This nearly utopian but excitingly plausible future of abundance and ease can not become a reality unless we determine an alternative means of redistributing the wealth that our society creates to the jobs whereby we currently share capital. Your suburban home, 3-D printer, self-driving car, cheap energy, stable family, and thriving community will not be possible unless you can fund them somehow. And the sorts of discrete freelance tasks they envision us doing from home will not be adequate. We will require some kind of mechanisms to take our general abundance and get it into the hands of private citizens, independent of the concept of the "job" as we now know it.<br><br>
We already have inklings of how we can start achieving this end, in <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/19/AR2005081901520.html">proposals like former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill's birth accounts</a>, which would see us set aside money in a private account for every child from birth to age 18, rendering a million dollar cushion for retirement. But we could likewise foster the nuclear family, strong community values, tendency towards private association, property ownership, and other institutions we inherited from the Saxons by rewarding participation in them with account contributions and homestead rights and the like. The potential exists to create a cycle of virtue, where your own affluence would be tied directly to the values and institutions that have made our society so affluent to begin with.
Getting to this Third Way America, or America 3.0, will be much harder than generating the technological innovations that have largely made it possible, and we'll require much more dialogue to get us moving in that direction. This book represents a good beginning, and is excellent on what it is we need to conserve as we move forward, but it is unfortunately very preliminary because of what it leaves out of the discussion. <br><br>
<p>Grade: A-</p><div class="feedflare">
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Mon, 22 Jul 2013 00:00:01 ESThttp://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1825Review of What We Can't Not Know: A Guide (J. Budziszewski)<blockquote>George Orwell wrote that "We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." This
book is an attempt at re-statement.
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <b>J. Budziszewski</b>, Introduction to <u>What We Can't Not Know</u></blockquote><br>
I recall several years ago, during his <a href=http://www.people.virginia.edu/~govdoc/thomas/hearings.html>Supreme Court nomination hearing</a>,
Clarence Thomas was closely questioned about whether he subscribed to Natural Law doctrine. Having just finished law school, I was surprised not
to be more familiar with what the Senators doing the questioning clearly thought was a terribly dangerous theory. Even more astonishing was that Al
Gore voted against Mr. Thomas on the basis of the judge's belief in Natural Law [<a href=http://www.counterpunch.org/thomas.html>-ESSAY: When
Joe Loved Clarence</a> (Counter Punch, October 16, 2000)]. Imagine then my astonishment when I realized that all they were worrying about was
the notion, seemingly obvious to most Americans, that the justness of our laws ultimately depends for its foundation on the universal moral code that
God, in the lovely <a href=http://bible.gospelcom.net/bible?passage=rom+2:15&version=KJV>formulation of Paul</a>, has written in our hearts. In
this book, J. Budziszewski presents--in admirably clear, concise, and convincing fashion--an invaluable guide to understanding the Natural Law and
the case for its enduring truth:
<blockquote>[T]here are some moral truths that we all really know--truths which a normal human being is unable <i>not</i> to know. They are a
universal possession, an emblem ofl mind, an heirloom of the family of man. That doesn't mean that we know them with unfailing perfect clarity, or
that we have reasoned out their remotest implications: we don't, and we haven't. Nor does it mean that we never pretend not to know them even
though we do, and we do. It doesn't even mean that we are born knowing them, that we never get mixed up about them, or that we assent to them just
as readily whether they are taught to us or not. <i>That</i> can't even be said of "two plus two is four." Yet our common moral knowledge is as real
as arithmetic, and probably just as plain. Paradoxically, maddeningly, we appeal to it even to justify wrongdoing; rationalization is the homage paid by
sin to guilty knowledge.</blockquote>
As important, he demonstrates that this truth is and has been under attack for some time and the dire consequences of abandoning it as the basis for
morality.<br>
<br>
Opponents of Natural Law, and of Judeo-Christian morality generally, are wont to portray the Bible as so self-contradictory or out-dated that it can
provide no reliable guidance on contemporary issues, but Mr. Budziszewski traces the Natural Law to just two sources about which there is fairly little
disagreement--the Ten Commandments, presented here (from Deuteronomy) as:
<blockquote>(1) I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods
before me. You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath or that is in
the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and
keep my commandments.<br>
<br>
(2) You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.<br>
<br>
(3) Observe the sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh
day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son or your daughter, or your manservant or your maidservant,
or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your manservant and your maidservant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that
you were a servant in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out thence with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the
LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.<br>
<br>
(4) Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God commanded you; that your days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with you,
in the land which the LORD your God gives you.<br>
<br>
(5) You shall not kill.<br>
<br>
(6) Neither shall you commit adultery.<br>
<br>
(7) Neither shall you steal.<br>
<br>
(8) Neither shall you bear false witness against your neighbor.<br>
<br>
(9) Neither shall you covet your neighbor's wife.<br>
<br>
(10) And you shall not desire your neighbor's house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your
neighbor's.</blockquote>
...and the restatement of these commandments, the Summary of the Law by Thomas Aquinas (a portion of which is referred to as The Golden Rule):
<blockquote>You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great
commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the
prophets.</blockquote>
And he proceeds to discuss their timelessness and the ways that they can and do still offer very nearly the only moral guidance we have.<br>
<br>
There's much that's useful in all the following discussion, but perhaps one example will suffice as demonstration. Mr. Budziszewski discusses the
ways in which our consciences plaque us when we trangress what we know to be Natural Law, and he refers to the different ways as the five Furies:
Remorse; Confession; Atonement; Reconciliation; and Justification. There are two current political/moral arguments where we see Reconciliation at
work. As Mr. Budziszewski says: "The graver the transgression, the wider the gulf between the transgressor and humane society--and the deeper the
sense of significance with which the substitute bonds must be imbued." Consider euthanasia and homosexuality, issue's where advocates do not
merely demand that such pathologies be allowed by society but that they receive an official imprimatur--assistance by physicians and the legal system
in the case of euthanasia; anti-discrimination law and marriage in the case of homosexuality. It is precisely because they have so radically alienated
themselves from what they and the rest of us know to be right that they demand that we join them:
<blockquote>They want to belong; they want to belong as they are; there can be only one solution. Society must reconcile with <i>them</i>. The
shape of human life must be transformed.</blockquote>
Folk often wonder why it should be that people who engage in such radically anti-social behaviors should then seek access to such conservative means
and institutions. The answer, of course, is that they know themselves to be in the wrong and must implicate the rest of us, lest we be a standing
rebuke to them. They hope for our acclamation and approbation to drown out the murmur of disapproval from their tell-tale hearts.<br>
<br>
Between the clear and convincing explanation of the sources and meanings of the Natural Law itself and sharp insights like these, into how we seek to
avoid the import of the Law, Mr. Budziszewski's book serves as an invaluable introduction. If nothing else, with several divisive Supreme Court
nominations coming in the not too distant future, this guide will tell you what's really going on when Democratic Senators try making conservatives
seem like cult members for basically believing in God's commandments to Man. It turns out that it's a cult a fair number of us belong to and upon
which our Republic and our legal system are premised.<p>Grade: A</p><div class="feedflare">
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Sun, 17 Aug 2003 00:00:01 ESThttp://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1270Review of Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross (Richard Neuhaus)<blockquote>[W]e preach Christ crucified.<br>
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <b>Paul</b>, <a href=http://www.lostpineschurchofchrist.com/start/kjv30/B46C001.htm>1 Corinthians 1: 23</a></blockquote><br>
<br>
<blockquote>In perfect freedom, the Son become the goat become the Lamb of God is condemned by the lie in order to bear witness to the truth. The truth is that we are incapable of setting things right. The truth is that the more we try to set things right, the more we compound our guilt. It is not enough for God to take our part. God must take our place. All the blood of goats and lambs, all the innocent victims from the foundation of the world, all the acts of expiation and reparation ... all strengthen the grip of the great lie that we can set things right. The grip of that lie is broken by the greatest of lies, 'God is guilty!' ... God must die. It is a lie so monstrous that to suggest it invites instant annihilation--except that God accepts the verdict.<br>
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <b>Richard John Neuhaus</b>, <u>Death on a Friday Afternoon</u></blockquote><br>
<br>
Father Neuhaus proceeds from a deceptively simple premise: "If what Christians say about Good Friday is true, then it is, quite simply, the truth about
everything." The problem is that what Christians say about Good Friday is surpassing strange; for Christians say that on that day God died. Needless
to say, for most human societies in most times God or gods have been defined by their power, by thy their immortality--how can it be that Christians
should think worthy of worship a God (in His incarnation as Christ) who can die, and not just die, but die on a cross like a common criminal,
betrayed, despised, broken, alone, suffering, and despairing? The answer must be that this death has a meaning of such signifigance that the
seemingly inexplicable death of God lies at the very core of what it means to be a Christian. The death of Christ redeems mankind and fulfills God's
plan of salvation for Man, leaving us with reason to hope that there is a life beyond death. This story is the "paschal mystery" and as Father Neuhaus
says:
<blockquote>These pages are an exploration into mystery. The word "mystery" in this connection does not mean a puzzle, as in a murder mystery. It
is not a thing to be solved, but an adventure into wonder, with each wonder that we encounter leading on to the next and greater
wonder.</blockquote>
This definition is particularly apt because he then leads the reader on an adventure of wonder, by meditating, one chapter for each, upon Christ's Seven
Last Words:<br>
<blockquote>Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. (Luke 23:34)<br>
<br>
Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise. (Luke 23:43)<br>
<br>
Woman, behold, your son. Son, behold your mother. (John 19:26-27)<br>
<br>
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? [<i>Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?</i>] (Mark 15:34)<br>
<br>
I thirst. (John 19:28)<br>
<br>
It is finished (John 19:30)<br>
<br>
Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. (Luke 23:46)</blockquote><br>
<br>
As he discusses these Seven Last Words, Mr. Neuhaus weaves together original sources, scholarship from all ages, popular art, personal anecdotes, etc., until what emerges may be meditation, but can hardly be called mere speculation. No one will agree with everything he says, but few will disagree with all and, even if we still can't discern it clearly, none who read with an open mind will argue that there is not truth contained within the mystery.<br>
<br>
Here is an extended sample of his style, which you'll note is not unlike that of a learned but approachable professor just shooting the breeze, from the First Chapter:
<blockquote>This, then, is our circumstance. Something has gone dreadfully wrong with the world, and with us in the world. Things are out of whack. It is not all our fault, but it is our fault too. We cannot blame our distant parents for that fateful afternoon in the garden, for we were there. We, too, reached for the forbidden fruit-the forbidden fruit by which we not only know good and evil, but, much more fatefully, presume to name good and evil. [...]<br>
<br>
The First Word from the cross: "Father, forgive them." Forgiveness costs. Whatever the theory of atonement, this is at the heart of it, that forgiveness costs. Any understanding of what makes at-one-ment possible includes a few simple truths. First, like the child, we know that something very bad has happened. Something has gone very wrong with us and with the world of which we are part. The world is not and we are not what we know was meant to be. That is the most indubitable of truths; it is beyond dispute, it weighs with self-evident force upon every mind and heart that have not lost the sensibility that makes us human.
The something very bad that has happened takes the form of the long, dreary list of history's horribles, from concentration camps to the tortured deaths of innocent children. And it takes the everyday forms of the habits of compromise, of loves betrayed, of lies excused, of dreams deferred until they die. The indubitable truth is illustrated in ways beyond number, from Auschwitz to the shattered cookie jar on the kitchen floor. Something very bad has happened.<br>
<br>
Second-and here I simplify outrageously, but our purpose is to cut through to the heart of the matter-we are complicit in what has gone so terribly wrong. We have problems with that. World-class criminals, murderers and drug traffickers, if they know what they have done, may have no trouble with that, but for many of us it may be a bit hard to swallow. I mean, we haven't done anything that bad, have we? Surely nothing so bad as to make us responsible for the death of God on the cross ? True, the writer of 1 Timothy called himself "the chief of sinners," and St. Paul did do some nasty things to the Christians in his earlier life as Saul of Tarsus. But then it would seem that he made up for it with an exemplary, indeed saintly, life. Chief of sinners? There would seem to be an element of pious hyperbole there, perhaps even an unseemly boastfulness, a reverse pride, so to speak.<br>
<br>
It is difficult to face up to our complicity because the confession of sins does not come easy. It is also difficult because we do not want to compound our complicity by claiming sins that are not ours. We rightly recoil from those who seem to wallow in guilt. The story is told of the rabbi and cantor who, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, lament their sins at great length, each concluding that he is a nobody. Then the sexton, inspired by their example, laments his sins and declares that he, too, is a nobody. "Nuh," says the rabbi to the cantor. "Who is he to be a nobody?"<br>
<br>
Contemporary sensibilities are offended by what is dismissively termed "guilt tripping." Some while ago I was on the same lecture platform with a famous television evangelist from California who is noted for accenting the positive and upbeat in the Christian message. According to this evangelist, it is as with Coca-Cola: Everything goes better with Jesus. He had built a huge new church called, let us say, New Life Cathedral, and he explained that during the course of the building there was a debate about whether the cathedral should feature a cross. It was thought that the cross might prompt negative thoughts, maybe even thoughts about suffering and death. "Finally, I said that of course there will be a cross," the famous evangelist said. "After all, the cross is the symbol of Christianity and we are a Christian church. But I can guarantee you," he declared with a triumphant smile, "there is nothing downbeat about the cross at New Life Cathedral!"<br>
<br>
St. Paul said the cross is "foolishness to the Greeks" and a "stumbling block to the Jews" and seemed to think it would always be that way. Little did he know what gospel salesmanship would one day achieve. In the eighteenth century, Isaac Watts wrote the hymn words: "Alas! and did my Savior bleed, / And did my Sovereign die? / Would He devote that sacred head / For such a worm as I?" A worm? Really now ? A contemporary hymnal puts it this way: "Would he devote that sacred head / For sinners such as I?" Surely "sinners" is bad enough. Similarly with the much beloved "Amazing Grace." "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me." "Wretch" will never do. That is cleaned up in a contemporary version: "That loved a soul like me."<br>
<br>
Examples can be multiplied many times over. Groveling is out, self-esteem is in. And if self-esteem seems not quite the right note for Good Friday, at least our complicity can be understood as limited liability. Very limited. Perhaps the changes in Christian thought are not all bad. There have been in Christian devotion excesses of self-accusation, of "scrupulosity," as it used to be called. Wallowing in guilt and penitential grandstanding are justly criticized. And yet ? We cannot just take the scissors to all those Bible passages that say he died for us and because of us, that they were our sins he bore upon the cross. Yes, Christianity is about resurrection joy, but do not rush to Easter. Good Friday makes inescapable the question of complicity.<br>
<br>
I may think it modesty when I draw back from declaring myself chief of sinners, but it is more likely a failure of imagination. For what sinner should I speak if not for myself? Of all the billions of people who have lived and of all the thousands whom I have known, whom should I say is the chief of sinners? Surely I am authorized, surely I am competent to speak only for myself? When in the presence of God the subject of sin is raised, how can I help but say that chiefly it is I? Not to confess that I am chiefly the one is not to confess at all. It is the evasion of Adam, who said, "It was the woman whom you gave to be with me." It is the evasion of Eve, who said, "The serpent beguiled me." It is not to confess at all, and by our making of excuses is our complicity compounded.<br>
<br>
"Forgive them, for they know not what they do." But now, like the prodigal son, we have come to our senses. Our lives are measured not by the lives of others, not by our own ideals, not by what we think might reasonably be expected of us, although by each of those measures we acknowledge failings enough. Our lives are measured by who we are created and called to be, and the measuring is done by the One who creates and calls. Finally, the judgment that matters is not ours. The judgment that matters is the judgment of God, who alone judges justly. In the cross we see the rendering of the verdict on the gravity of our sin.</blockquote>
On display here are the two things that most distinguish his discourse, the challenges he presents to both liberals and conservatives (for lack of better terms): first, he demands that we take the crucifixion seriously, that we accept that God suffered and died, that this sacrifice is integral to the story, and that the Cross is a symbol of suffering; second, he universalizes the atonement and places these events in a Jewish context, requiring us to accept that the fulfillment that Christ enacted upon the Cross is of Jewish tradition and is the basis for all mankind's salvation. The ground he has staked out will upset those who seek to soft pedal the crucifixion, who try to make the story "happier", who even maintain that Christ did not die upon the Cross. It will also, <a href=http://www.newoxfordreview.org/2001/may01/editorial.html>and has</a>, upset those who insist that only Christian believers are saved by Christ's act of atonement. He explains the reason for both these themes here:
<blockquote>Throughout these reflections, I have frequently mentioned the gnostic distortions of the Christian Gospel. Perhaps readers may think I am too insistent about the specificity--what scholars call the "historicity"--of the story of salvation. But I am persuaded that everything depends on this. Specificity is all. It is for this reason that I have turned again and again to the <i>Jewishness</i> of the Christian story. In the shadow of the Holocaust, it is both morally imperative and good manners to emphasize the linkage between Judaism and Christianity. But much more is involved than a moral imperative, and certainly much more than good manners. It simply is not possible to understand the Christian story apart from its placement in the Jewish story. We have been discussing God's radical identification of his fate with the fate of the Old Testament prophets, and in that identification we have a foretaste, an intimation, of what Christians mean by the mystery of the incarnation. That God became man is not entirely a Christian <i>novum</i>, it is not an idea that came out of nowhere.</blockquote>
Precisely because we are dealing here with mystery it is possible for either or both sides to raise objections to Father Neuhaus, but because he's always returning to the "historicity" of the matter his position seems at least defensible. <br>
<br>
At any rate, agree with him or not, the book is so thought provoking and such a joy to read that anyone will find it rewarding, while those who believe that what happened on that long ago Friday matters utterly and matters universally--for all men, not just for Christians--will find it indispensable.
N.B.--Here are some texts that may be useful in your reading:
<br>
<br>
<br>
<a href=http://www.bartleby.com/108/19/22.html>Psalm 22</a> (King James Version)
<blockquote>1 My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?<br>
<br>
2 O my God, I cry in the day time, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.<br>
<br>
3 But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.<br>
<br>
4 Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.<br>
<br>
5 They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.<br>
<br>
6 But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.<br>
<br>
7 All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying,<br>
<br>
8 He trusted on the LORD that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him.<br>
<br>
9 But thou art he that took me out of the womb: thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother's breasts.<br>
<br>
10 I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother's belly.<br>
<br>
11 Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help.<br>
<br>
12 Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round.<br>
<br>
13 They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a roaring lion.<br>
<br>
14 I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.<br>
<br>
15 My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death.<br>
<br>
16 For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.<br>
<br>
17 I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me.<br>
<br>
18 They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.<br>
<br>
19 But be not thou far from me, O LORD: O my strength, haste thee to help me.<br>
<br>
20 Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.<br>
<br>
21 Save me from the lion's mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns.<br>
<br>
22 I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee.<br>
<br>
23 Ye that fear the LORD, praise him; all ye the seed of Jacob, glorify him; and fear him, all ye the seed of Israel.<br>
<br>
24 For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard.<br>
<br>
25 My praise shall be of thee in the great congregation: I will pay my vows before them that fear him.<br>
<br>
26 The meek shall eat and be satisfied: they shall praise the LORD that seek him: your heart shall live for ever.<br>
<br>
27 All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the LORD: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee.<br>
<br>
28 For the kingdom is the LORD's: and he is the governor among the nations.<br>
<br>
29 All they that be fat upon earth shall eat and worship: all they that go down to the dust shall bow before him: and none can keep alive his own soul.<br>
<br>
30 A seed shall serve him; it shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation.<br>
<br>
31 They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this.</blockquote><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote>The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him. This time the camp executioner refused to act as executioner. Three SS replaced him.<br>
<br>
The victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. "Long live Liberty!" cried the two adults. But the child was silent.<br>
<br>
"Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind me asked. <br>
<br>
At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over.<br>
<br>
Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. "Bare your heads!" yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping. "Cover your heads!" <br>
<br>
Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive... <br>
<br>
For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. Behind me I heard the same man asking: "Where is God now?" <br>
<br>
And I hear a voice within me answer him: "Were is he? Here He is - He is hanging here on this gallows. . . "<br>
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <b>Elie Wiesel</b>, <u>Night</u></blockquote><br>
<br><a href=http://www.euronet.nl/users/sevenstar/poetry_altarwise.html>Altarwise by Owl-Light</a> (1935) (Dylan Thomas 1914-1953)
<blockquote>(Stanza VIII)<br>
<br>
This was the crucifixion on the mountain,<br>
Time's nerve in vinegar, the gallow grave<br>
As tarred with blood as the bright thorns I wept;<br>
The world's my wound, God's Mary in her grief,<br>
Bent like three trees and bird-papped through her shift,<br>
With pins for teardrops is the long wound's woman.<br>
This was the sky, Jack Christ, each minstrel angle<br>
Drove in the heaven-driven of the nails<br>
Till the three-coloured rainbow from my nipples<br>
From pole to pole leapt round the snail-waked world.<br>
I by the tree of thieves, all glory's sawbones,<br>
Unsex the skeleton this mountain minute,<br>
And by this blowcock witness of the sun<br>
Suffer the heaven's children through my <br>heartbeat.</blockquote><br>
<br>
<blockquote>Still as of old<br>
Men by themselves are priced --<br>
For thirty pieces <a href=http://www.redlandbaptist.org/sermons/ser_010701.shtml>Judas</a> sold<br>
Himself, not Christ.
-<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<b>Hester H. Cholmondeley</b></blockquote><br>
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Fri, 18 Apr 2003 00:00:01 ESThttp://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1269Review of Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (Burt Boyar)<p><b>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </b>The ultimate mystery is one's own self.
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <b>-Sammy Davis, Jr.</b>,
<u>Yes
I Can</u>
<p>Sammy Davis, Jr. should by all rights be mentioned in the same breath
with <a href="http://www.brothersjudd.com/webpage/baseballreviews.htm#jackierobinson">Jackie
Robinson</a> and Rosa Parks, as one of the great pioneers of the civil
rights era, blazing a trail that others would soon follow, their paths
eased by his efforts.&nbsp; But his reputation suffers from several factors.&nbsp;
First is just the fact that whereas Robinson and Parks went where no black
person had ever gone before, Davis was part of a great tradition of black
entertainers, like Paul Robeson, and that he went further than they and
opened more doors does not strike us as quite as remarkable as what someone
like Robinson achieved.&nbsp; Second, Davis was never the same kind of
hero in the black community that Robinson was.&nbsp; Davis made a conscious
decision to fit into white society and this brought down the wrath of many
in the black community, who accused him of being an Uncle Tom or wanting
to pass for white.&nbsp; Third, the various personas he adopted over the
course of his long career were not really conducive to earning him the
respect he deserved.&nbsp; He started out as a child novelty act, a three
year old song and dance man in an act with his father and Will Mastin,
the eponymous leader of the trio.&nbsp; Later, as a member of the Rat Pack,
he cultivated a sort of lounge lizard image.&nbsp; And by the end of his
career, he had acquired something of the tatty image of the later Elvis,
a Las Vegas-style act (back before Las Vegas had cleaned up its act), ravaged
by hard living, and somehow a traitor to his own talents.&nbsp; Tragically,
like Elvis, perhaps it took <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1208.html">his
death</a> for us to recall <a href="http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1077/4_55/59110862/print.jhtml">how
significant a figure he really was</a> in the history of entertainment.
<p>But whereas Elvis had to await the <a href="http://www.brothersjudd.com/webpage/musiclit.htm#lasttraintomemphis">great
posthumous biography by Peter Guralnick</a> before we could clearly see
what he had achieved, Sammy Davis, Jr. had coauthored, with Jane and Burt
Boyar, one of the really great autobiographies ever written, <u>Yes I Can</u>,
all the way back in 1965.&nbsp;&nbsp; Even had he not been such a great
entertainer, his shockingly honest and confessional story is so compelling
and so wonderfully told that it alone should have cemented his reputation
as a man to be reckoned with.&nbsp; Centuries from now, when people want
to understand what the sickness of racism was like, they will find no better,
more harrowing, depiction of its evil than in the section of this book
that details Davis's time in the Army.&nbsp; The discrimination he faced
in the music, and movie, business, disgusting as it was, can at least be
reasoned away as essentially a problem of the private sphere.&nbsp; But
to read of the despicable physical abuse that was perpetrated on him by
white goons while he was serving his country can't help but cause us a
deep sense of shame.&nbsp;&nbsp; It also makes his ultimate success all
the sweeter.
<p>Sammy Davis, Jr. was a man who survived much and triumphed gloriously.&nbsp;
If by the end of his life he had proven a more complex man than we might
have wished him to be--with his various personal scandals--only when we
know the remarkable true story of his difficult life can we begin to understand
the sources of that complexity.&nbsp; Raised in vaudeville and on the road,
with little or no schooling; denied entry to White America; renounced by
much of Black America; hounded by the tabloids and gossip columnists; an
eye lost in a car accident; a convert to Judaism; despised; exploited;
revered; loved; it's an amazing tale.
<p>As it happens, we became friends with <a href="http://www.hitlerstoppedbyfranco.com">Burt
Boyar</a>, one of the coauthors of the book, when we reviewed his fine
novel <a href="warreviews.htm#hitlerstoppedbyfranco">Hitler Stopped by
Franco</a> (Mrs. Boyar, a coauthor of both, unfortunately passed several
years ago).&nbsp; We thought we'd take advantage of his generosity and
ask him a few questions about himself, the book, and Sammy Davis, Jr. :
<p><b>BROTHERS JUDD</b> : Hello, Mr. Boyar.&nbsp; First off, I was wondering
what had you written before this book?&nbsp; Were you and your wife ghostwriters
by trade?
<p><b>MR. BOYAR</b> : Prior to meeting Sammy I was a Broadway columnist
in New York, published daily in the <u>Morning Telegraph</u>, the Annenberg
owned "bible of horse racing".&nbsp; It was a full sized newspaper devoted
entirely to the sport, except for my column, which ran down the front page
on the left hand column, and a few others such as a drama critic Whitney
Bolton. I was syndicated into other Annenberg newspapers (<u>Philadelphia
Inquirer</u> and all <u>Daily Racing Forms</u>) and was picked up by the
Newhouse newspaper chain which ringed New York City, as well as elsewhere
across the country.
<p>I also wrote a weekly column for <u>TV Guide</u> and articles for them
around semi-monthly, as well as articles for <u>Esquire</u> and one piece
for <u>New York Magazine</u>. Jane worked with me, first as my wife but
quickly became indispensable yet would not have her name on anything&nbsp;
until we started writing Sammy's book when I insisted on it and she agreed.
<p><b>BROTHERS JUDD :</b> One of the most interesting things about the
book is how much more revealing it is than most celebrity autobiographies.
I was wondering how you and your wife came to the project.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Were you already friends of Mr. Davis and he felt comfortable opening up
to you, or were you brought in as part of the book deal and he was generally
this open with people?
<p><b>MR. BOYAR :</b> We met Sammy when he opened in <u>Mr. Wonderful</u>
on Broadway. I called him as I called all celebrities to see what I could
get for my column that day. He suggested dinner because he had been reading
me in the <u>Philadelphia Inquirer</u> when <u>Mr. W.</u> was trying-out
there, also his father read my column every day as he was a horse player
and always read the <u>Telegraph</u>. As dinner ended (at Danny's Hideaway)
Sammy apologized for having to go and do his show and said, 'What about
having dinner together....' and he thought about it for a moment, then
continued, 'five nights a week?'
<p>We had extraordinary chemistry&nbsp; from the first minute and in fact
we had dinner together seven nights a week. We were together at dinner,
then separated, Sammy to do his show and for us to go to whatever was opening
or happening in New York. Then we met at his apartment at the Gorham Hotel
on West 55th street&nbsp; and spent from midnight or one until it began
growing light, when we had to go home and write the column.
<p>We were with Sammy at all the good times and present for all the bad,
the single snarl or snub that would cut through the hundreds of people
giving him standing ovations and the like. After a particularly bad incident
we went back to his apartment and he was staring out the window at the
lights and said, 'We really should let people know what's happening. They
don't know, they don't understand...'
<p>We spoke of writing a novel but that wouldn't work because even without
mentioning him by&nbsp; name our names would give away who it was, as we
were widely known to be extremely close friends. Especially by my colleagues,
Walter Winchell, Leonard Lyons, Earl Wilson, Dorothy Kilgallen, Louis Sobol,
Ed Sullivan, etc.
<p>I mentioned the thought of a biographical or autobiographical book to
an agent after [after some difficulty finding a publisher they were all
comfortable with] finally Roger Straus read it and bought it.
<p><b>BROTHERS JUDD :</b> What was the process of writing the book like?&nbsp;
Did you interview Mr. Davis?&nbsp; Did he write out remembrances or dictate
them to a tape recorder?&nbsp; Did you end up traveling with him?
<p><b>MR. BOYAR :</b> We started off with a wealth of information on Sammy's
life gained simply by being with him every night for a year and talking
long into hundreds of nights. Then we began interviewing his family, Will
Mastin, all the people around him. Then we would go back to Sammy with
questions. He did not enjoy looking back and was ingenious at getting out
of those work sessions which always started after <a href="http://www.bigbandsandbignames.com/sammy.html">his
performance</a>.
<p>After he left New York and returned to nightclubs we joined him on the
road in Chicago, Miami, wherever I thought I could make do for a Broadway
column as well. That was very difficult and I realized that I could not
do justice to both so I took a one year leave of absence from the column,.&nbsp;
We took nearly six years to finish the book so obviously the column fell
by the wayside.
<p>Sammy did not make notes or dictate anything. It was all&nbsp; direct
interview with him and Jane and me, and the two of us with his other people.
<p><b>BROTHERS JUDD :</b> Still, some of the things he recalls are so painful
and some so embarrassing, it must have been difficult for him to share
them with you.&nbsp; One incident in particular, when he was in the Army
and some racists painted him white, just seems like it would be wrenching
both to tell and to hear.&nbsp; Why do you think he was able to and why
were you able to get him to?&nbsp; Were there specific methods you used
to get through the most difficult parts of his story?
<p><b>MR. BOYAR :</b> I think Sammy opened up specifically with us because
he knew us first as friends, for almost a year before we even thought about
writing a book.
<p>The army was excruciating for us all. It took a long time to pry it
out of him. Sammy never liked to look back, let alone at something so degrading.
We had no specific trick or method of dealing with this ghastly treatment
he had suffered.
<p>Jane and I did not drink at the time. Sammy sipped constantly but was
never drunk. After the sessions were over we played Monopoly, or played
different roles in Hamlet. He bought three copies of several of Shakespeare's
plays and we acted them out. And I amused him by singing to him ala Al
Jolson. I was a big Jolson fan, after seeing <u>The Jolson Story</u> six
times,&nbsp; I knew all the songs and did a fair Jolson. When Sammy was
down he'd say, 'Do that corny Jolson thing you do.' and I'd get down on
one knee and sing "Mammy" or "California Here I Come" and believe me that
would make anyone laugh and forget his troubles. You could say we exchanged
humiliations.
<p>Repeat, I think the answer to Sammy's openness with us was both his
integrity, he always gave a hundred and ten percent when he was working,
and his absolute trust in us, first as friends who had been with him through
quite a lot in one year and had apparently proven ourselves. Then, as biographers
working toward a common goal, to enlighten. Also, Sammy's philosophy of
living was, '...once you make up your mind to get into bed with someone,
then&nbsp; it's done, go for it with no reservations.'
<p><b>BROTHERS JUDD :</b> When it comes to the accident that cost him an
eye, it seems that Mr. Davis not only had no bitterness, but even felt
that it may ironically have catapulted him into the big time and that it
helped bring him to Judaism.&nbsp; Was he ambivalent about the accident?
<p><b>MR. BOYAR :</b> At no time did Sammy ever make a positive or negative
statement, or indicate a feeling one way or another, about losing his eye.
In fact, he had "made it" at Ciro's with both eyes. He was acutely aware
of the value of the enormous publicity the accident received. It was, literally,
front page news across the country. And he enjoyed the eye patch for the
glamor and identity it gave him. But,&nbsp; I can't say that he was ambivalent
about the accident. I think he would have preferred to have both eyes and
to have continued his ascent in show business, building on the first Ciro's.
Yet, he never complained about having one eye. It was simply a fact of
his life.
<p>When we used to hang out all night at his apartment (during <u>Mr. Wonderful</u>)
if Jane or Chita Rivera or Michael Wettach (assistant stage manager and
part of our "family") got snappy with him he would remove his plastic eye
and chase them around the room with it.
<p>I don't think that losing&nbsp; the eye brought him to Judaism. I think
racism did. He needed something to help him survive that constant oppression
and he clung, with hope, to the Jews' ability to survive thousands of years
of being hated, and searched for what it was that they had that made that
possible.
<p><b>BROTHERS JUDD :</b> Unlike so many autobiographies, that come and
go as quickly as the star's fame, this one seems of enduring importance.&nbsp;
The story of his struggles with racism and to make it in show business
is really compelling.&nbsp; Of course it became a bestseller and has been
reissued throughout the years since.&nbsp; Did you know when you were writing
it just how good a story you were telling?
<p><b>MR. BOYAR :</b> I don't think Jane or I ever knew what a great story
we were telling. We frequently wondered to each other, 'Is this a book?'
We were just appalled by what a man, a friend of ours, as he had become,
suffered in New York City in the late 1950's. A Broadway star, at that!
And, we were just telling people what was happening, in the well founded
belief that they really did not know. The injustice and sheer stupidity
of it was stunning to us.
<p>The proof that people did NOT know, or care, is that <u>Yes I Can</u>,
when it was already a 1000 page early draft, was turned down by almost
every publisher in New York until Roger Straus read it and bought it immediately
and even personally edited it with us, something he had not done since
he edited <a href="revtext.htm#lostweekend">The Lost Weekend</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Harcourt Brace wouldn't even read it. They all, I believe, saw only the
glitzy show biz 'Sammy Davis Jr. Story'. Roger saw the racial document,
which is what has made it survive all these years.
<p>It cost Jane and me the syndicated daily newspaper column and we were
scared to death but irrationally, emotionally compelled to stay with it
till we had it right. A one year leave of absence from the column was lost
in a six year labyrinth.
<p>In later years, working with Marlene Dietrich's daughter, Maria Riva,
on a biography of her mother we noted Dietrich's comment about her work
on <u>The Blue Angel</u>, a film she had embarked on like just another
of the anonymous dozen or so before it. After it was a worldwide success,
Dietrich said, 'You never know it when you are working on a classic.'&nbsp;
It also reminds me of Sammy disliking both <u>The Candy Man</u> and <u>Mr.
Bojangles</u>, and not wanting to sing those two songs that were so major
in his career. After they were successful he said, 'You think you've got
all these smarts, but it's the people who decide.'
<p><b>BROTHERS JUDD :</b> It sometimes seems that if we read between the
lines we can perceive that Sammy is developing into a drinker or a ladies
man, but he plays that stuff pretty close to the vest until a problem crops
up or a story breaks in the tabloids.&nbsp; Did he have such problems in
those years?&nbsp; Was he maintaining his own privacy by discussing such
things so tangentially?
<p><b>MR. BOYAR :</b> Sammy was always (from the day we met) a steady drinker
but rarely would he get drunk. Once or twice if he had 'a case of the humbles',
his expression for feeling down, the alcohol would cause him to get morose
and teary-eyed. I am speaking of the period in New York when there were
so many slights every day that you simply wouldn't imagine could happen
to a man starring on Broadway. He did his best to ignore or at least not
acknowledge them, because they were embarrassing to him, but they would
pile up and occasionally they would just overflow.
<p>Sammy was a sipper. Always had a Jack Daniels and Coke at hand but rarely
finished one. He usually left them somewhere and his dresser would make
another. He would got through a bottle of bourbon (later vodka) in a day,
but more than the drinking he liked having&nbsp; the glass in his hand.
It was a prop.
<p>He watched his weight and once I suggested he switch to Diet Coke but
he stayed with regular Coke because, 'I want the sugar for energy.' Before
a show he would have a cup of coffee with four envelopes of sugar in it.
He would hold them all together and shake them all at once, tear them all
at once and pour them in as if it were a single envelope. He had style.
<p>As to being a ladies' man, Sammy was enormously attractive to many women.
More than once Jane and I would dodge requests from friends' wives to meet
him after the show because despite the racial difference, their marriages,
their husbands present at that moment, they lusted for him. Sammy knew
this and tried to downplay all relationships with women because they were
all trouble.
<p>Even if he were dating a girl of an appropriate age and color, innuendo
would emerge and some column or somebody would create a scandal. That was
good and bad. He knew that he had profited by being controversial but he
was wise enough to know that it could also turn off members of his audience,
so during those years he tried to avoid public comments about his women.
Even Chita Rivera who was his girlfriend during <u>Mr. Wonderful</u> (she
was the show's dance captain) was not publicly acceptable because she was
Latino and that was not acceptable in the 50's for a "negro", the only
p.c. term then.
<p><b>BROTHERS JUDD :</b> The way he talks about his first marriage and
the Kim Novack rumors, it seems as if, whether there was anything to the
stories or not, he felt there was pressure on him to get her out from under
the press feeding frenzy.&nbsp; Was that your understanding or was there
more to it than that?
<p><b>MR. BOYAR :</b> Remember that <u>Yes I Can</u> was published in 1965
and written between then and 1959 or 1958. Jane and I did not know, at
that time, that he had married Loray White under 'do it or get your other
eye poked out' orders from some hoods under an order from Harry Cohen,
Columbia Pictures, owner of Kim's contract. Sammy alluded to it with us,
but was too embarrassed to tell us the real story. He played it to us that
he did not want to damage Kim's career with an controversy and so he did
the smokescreen wedding to Loray White.
<p>Later, in the mid 1980's, researching <u>Why Me?</u> he told us that
a contract had been taken out and he was strongly advised by Sam Giancana,
a friend, to do something fast to get the heat off of himself. Giancana
could protect him in most parts of the country but not if he went back
to L.A. I have always been surprised that such a contract could even happen
because every place that Sammy played was mob owned and his appearances
were money in the bank to any club or casino, thus he would seem to be
too valuable to allow to be damaged. Yet, there are always a few renegade
thugs somewhere who can be hired, I suppose.
<p><b>BROTHERS JUDD :</b> You mentioned how stunned you were by the racism
that Sammy faced even in New York and I read the passages where you guys
were present with great interest.&nbsp; I wonder what that must have been
like?&nbsp; Was it simply a matter of being told tables weren't available
or shunted to a corner, or comments from people?&nbsp; How overt was this
and how covert?&nbsp; Would you have understood what was going on if Sammy
had not had such finely tuned attentiveness to such intentional slights?
<p><b>MR. BOYAR :</b> Jane and I were always aware of the racial pressure
on Sammy. In the preface to the present compilation of <u>Yes I Can</u>
and <u>Why Me?</u>: <u><a href="http://www.fsbassociates.com/fsg/sammy.htm">Sammy:
An Autobiography</a></u>, we say that we think that among the reasons he
might have been attracted to spend a lot of time with us was the fact that
we were a wholesome, white, well known New York couple and in a sense when
we went out together Jane and I were riding shotgun for him. But, again,
remember that this was the fifties in New York and we were entirely aware
of the racial barriers.
<p>Not long before Sammy got to New York Walter Winchell had crucified
Josephine Baker for going to the Stork Club and protesting (to him) about
the slow or no service she received.&nbsp; He went after her like she was
a communist and literally chased her out of America.
<p>Few people attempted to climb the barriers before Sammy. Performers
like Nat "King" Cole would play the Copacabana and then go uptown to the
Hotel Theresa in Harlem. Sammy had a different point of view, 'They haven't
made a hotel that's as luxurious as I want to live in.'&nbsp; So he made
the effort to stay, for example, at The Sherry Netherlands, around the
corner from the Copa, or the Waldorf Towers, or '...wherever anyone else
with my fame and financial ability would be able to stay.'
<p>The result is that he opened a lot of doors that others would go through
after him. Just before he died there was a 3 hour ABC-TV special, an homage
to him produced by George Schlatter. Michael Jackson appeared and sang
a song he had had written for the occasion: <u>I Am Here 'Cause You Were
There</u>.&nbsp; In a recent Oxford Television (London) documentary Whoopie
Goldberg said, 'There wouldn't be me if there hadn't been Sammy.'<p>Grade: A+</p><div class="feedflare">
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Tue, 09 Apr 2002 00:00:01 ESThttp://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/993Review of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Rick Perlstein)<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A great strength of the two-party system is that
basically we have been in general agreement on
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; many things and neither party has been the party
of extremes or radicals, but temporarily some
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; extreme elements have come into one of the parties
and have driven out or locked out or booed out
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; or heckled out the moderates.
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <b>-Lyndon Baines Johnson</b>,
October 24, 1964
<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I would like to suggest that there is no such thing
as a left or right.&nbsp; There is only an up or down: Up
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; to man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual
freedom consistent with law and order; or down
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; to the ant heap of totalitarianism.
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <b>-Ronald Wilson Reagan</b>,
October 27, 1964, <a href="http://www.seattleu.edu/artsci/departments/history/us1945/docs/regwis.htm">A
Time for Choosing</a>
<p>This is a terrific, nearly novelistic, account of the movement, mostly
subterranean at the time, by American conservatives to take back the Republican
Party from the Eastern Establishment, after several decades in the wilderness,
and run one of their own, Senator Barry Goldwater, for president in 1964.&nbsp;
Author Rick Perlstein--though a self described "European-style Social Democrat"
(if I recall correctly from <a href="http://www.booknotes.org/archive/bn060301.asp">his
appearance on Booknotes</a>)--is clearly fascinated by the colorful characters,
Byzantine machinations, and heartfelt ideals that went into this epic struggle
and he's managed to turn a topic that might have been dry and scholarly
into an exciting story about the triumph of ideas.&nbsp; In many ways the
book owes less to Teddy White, the erstwhile chronicler of Presidential
campaigns, than to Fletcher Knebel, the great thriller writer of the 60s,
whose bestsellers tended to rely on the existence of Vast Right Wing Conspiracies
long before it was cool to see them lurking behind every subpoena.&nbsp;
Perlstein actually gets to write about a real conspiracy here, the plan
by a reasonably small band of political activists to force their party
to return to its conservative principles, and it makes for lively political
history.&nbsp; Perhaps the best facet of the book is that he is always
fair, and often sympathetic, to a Right Wing which has all too often been
the subject of shallow and brutally unfavorable caricature in the journalism
and academic writing about American politics.
<p>As compelling as Perlstein's authoritatively detailed narrative is though,
one wishes that he'd provided an equally thorough&nbsp; political and historical
analysis of these events.&nbsp; In the introduction to the book he states
that the conservative movement must be seen as part and parcel of the broader
social upheaval of the 60s, and cites Murray Kempton to the effect that
it may have been more significant than the more well known activism of
the Left.&nbsp; I think this thesis is somewhat dubious, but it hardly
matters because he doesn't really bother trying to prove it ("We must assume
that the conservative revival is <i>the</i> youth movement of the '60s").&nbsp;
I can't emphasize enough how open minded and generous Perlstein is in examining
the ideas and motivations of those on the Right (whose politics were after
all antithetical to his own), but at the same time it seems as if he may
have simply expected readers to share his assumption that prior to the
Goldwater candidacy there existed what he calls in the books subtitle an
"American Consensus" and that the breaking of that consensus was necessarily
revolutionary.&nbsp; On the contrary, as the story he tells here amply
demonstrates, what appeared to be a consensus was a flukish and necessarily
temporary construct, a function mostly of the bizarre politics, and unfortunate
American history, of Race.
<p>The two great American political parties can be roughly defined as standing
for freedom from government (Republicans) and reliance on government (Democrats).&nbsp;
It is for this basic reason that the Republican Party is said to be a party
of ideas, while the Democrats are a party of groups.&nbsp; Typically this
dichotomy has meant that the two parties have been fairly evenly matched,
as the number of folks demanding government largesse has seldom been sufficient
to tilt the balance entirely in the Democrats favor.&nbsp; And speaking
in the most general terms, it has generally tended to be the case that
the Republicans were the party of the haves, Democrats of the have nots.&nbsp;
But in the years after the Civil War there was a very odd exception to
this rule : blacks, even poor blacks, who would normally be expected to
adhere to the party of big government, were instead loyal to the Republican
Party which had freed the slaves.&nbsp; On the other hand, White Southerners,
though culturally conservative, devoutly religious, stubbornly independent,
and relatively economically advantaged, at least in comparison to their
black neighbors, remained loyal to the Democrats, who, even under FDR,
reciprocated by defending their right to maintain Jim Crow segregation.&nbsp;
The result of all this was that the Republicans remained mostly a party
of the North, despite immigration and industrialization which should have
benefited Democrats.&nbsp; Meanwhile, the Democrats completely dominated
the South, even though their natural constituency in the black population
voted, when allowed, against them.&nbsp; But this was a situation that
was inherently unstable.
<p>Then, in the wake of the Great Depression, the delicately balanced numbers
did shift and tilted in favor of the Democrats.&nbsp; Although obviously
simplistic and ultimately mistaken, it is easy to see why people blamed
capitalism for the collapse of America's economy in the late 20s and early
30s and the Republican Party, the party of the unfettered Free Market,
was understandably made to pay the price for the calamity .&nbsp; Given
this context it is also easy to see why many in the Republican Party became
little better than me-too New Dealers, accepting without question the mammoth
expansion of the role of government in the economy.&nbsp; But as recovery
came, with the rebirth of industry to supply armaments to first the Allies
and then our own Armed Forces, and as the GOP shifted Left, the balance
did not return.&nbsp; Blacks had at last followed their perceived economic
self-interest and transferred their allegiance to the Democratic Party.&nbsp;
However the corresponding shift of Southern whites to the GOP failed to
occur right away because the rather patrician Republican Party was, somewhat
to its credit, resistant to playing the race card in the same way that
the Democrats had for so long in the South.&nbsp; Because of this strange
convergence of unusual political forces, the Democratic Party was the majority
party in American politics, at least at the legislative level, for sixty
years (until the 1994 Republican landslide).
<p>This central fact was obscured to some extent by the victories of <a href="index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/735">Eisenhower</a>
in 1952 and of <a href="index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/740">Nixon</a> in 1968.&nbsp;
They gave the illusion that the GOP was competitive at the national level.&nbsp;
But if you dig just a tiny bit deeper you find that both were elected only
when Democrats had gotten the country mired in intractable foreign wars;
one was a war hero, the other his Vice President; both agreed to leave
the Welfare State largely intact or even to expand it; both agreed to leave
the Soviet Union intact; and both were, largely thanks to these moderate/liberal
positions, anointed by the Eastern Establishment of the Party.&nbsp; Lost
in all this was the genuine voice of the Party, the Robert Taft style conservatism
which distrusted powerful domestic government and foreign entanglements.
<p>It was the great insight of those who organized the conservative revival
and the Goldwater candidacy that you could win the Republican nomination
by giving vent to that true voice.&nbsp; Perlstein has a great section
featuring Clarence Manion, one of the may unknown heroes of the movement
who are here given their due.&nbsp; Manion's plan for 1960 was :
<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ...to build movements behind both a Republican and
a Southern Democrat running on conservative
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; platforms, watch as both were turned back at their
respective party conventions, then merge the two
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; organizations to form a new party to back one of
the candidates, who, combining the votes of
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Dixiecrats and Taft Republicans, could finally block
the major-party candidates from their
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; electoral college majority.
<p>This did not, of course, happen in 1960, but with the increasing racial
divisiveness of the Civil Rights struggle, folks in the movement soon realized
that they did not even need the third party, that they could use the same
strategy to remake the Republican Party into a conservative party, and
make the Party competitive in the South.
<p>In Goldwater they found a vehicle to test their theory, but the candidate's
shortcomings--such as temper, bluntness, woeful communication skills, lack
of decisiveness and organization, etc.---which Perlstein does a good job
of demonstrating, and the "tragic" circumstances of the Kennedy assassination
(which as Perlstein notes was cynically exploited by the Press and Democrats
to discredit "Right Wing Extremism", much as the Oklahoma City bombing
would be brilliantly manipulated thirty years later by Bill Clinton and
the Press to bring Newt Gingrich to heel) ) created a climate in which
their great experiment would fail miserably.&nbsp; But at the end of the
1964 campaign there emerged the nearly perfect candidate, a figure who
would achieve the conservative apotheosis : Ronald Reagan.&nbsp;&nbsp;
In due time, and admittedly taking advantage of another disastrous Democratic
presidency, Reagan would restore conservative Republicanism to its natural
place in the public debate, in rough balance with the liberal Democrats.&nbsp;
Then in 1994, the generation of Republican leaders who had imbibed these
lessons would finally restore the balance in Congress, largely on the strength
of a resurgence of the Party in the South.
<p>We are left today with the two parties occupying a position of near
equilibrium.&nbsp; Looking back from this point, it should be clear that
the "American Consensus" was always a fiction, that it was a product not
of broad political agreement, but of a series of historical/political aberrations.&nbsp;
It is perhaps helpful to view the campaign of Barry Goldwater as extending
from the publication of <u>The Conscience of a Conservative</u> (read <a href="index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/853">Orrin's
review</a>)--which was written for him by Brent Bozell, brother-in-law
of William F. Buckley Jr.--to the <a href="http://www.seattleu.edu/artsci/departments/history/us1945/docs/regwis.htm">Time
for Choosing</a> speech--delivered on his behalf by Ronald Reagan.&nbsp;
Without seeking to diminish the man in any way, one might say, not that
had Goldwater not existed, the Right would have had to invent him, but
instead, as Perlstein shows, that they did indeed invent him, or at least
tried to.&nbsp; It also seems fair to say that the events of the book represent
a revolution only in the sense that they brought politics full circle,
back to the traditional divide between liberty and security, back to the
confrontation between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.
<p>None of the foregoing should be taken in any way to suggest that the
book is not eminently worth reading.&nbsp; It is in fact one of the better
political histories you'll ever read and I absolutely agree with him about
the importance of Goldwater and the conservative movement in general.&nbsp;
Considering the amount of research that went into it and that the book
already extends to 600 plus pages (with footnotes), it is certainly understandable
that these sorts of contextual issues are not really taken up in the text
of the book.&nbsp; And I'm sure that, having finished what is already a
splendid volume, Rick Perlstein wanted nothing more than to get on with
the rest of his life.&nbsp; But it would have been great to have an afterword
or something where he drew some personal conclusions about what it all
means.&nbsp; Actually, there's probably a shorter book to be made out of
this kind od discussion, one in which he could bring his own liberal leanings
into play and present his arguments that there was, and presumably should
have been, an American Consensus and that the conservative movement destroyed
it.&nbsp; He's a young man (one of the <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/168/writers.shtml#Rick">Voice
Literary Supplement's Writers on the Verge</a>) and I for one look forward
to his future books, regardless of whether he addresses these questions
or moves on to entirely new subjects.<p>Grade: A</p><div class="feedflare">
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Tue, 12 Jun 2001 00:00:01 ESThttp://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/857Review of Advise and Consent (Allen Drury)<p><u>Advise and Content</u> is sort of the undeserved poster child (along
with <u>Gone With the Wind</u>) for all of the intellectuals, critics and
"serious" writers who like to dismiss the various book awards.&nbsp; It
is deemed to be unworthy of recognition because it is: about politics;
is conservative in viewpoint, is conventional in form; and Drury's style
is quite earnest.&nbsp; Yeah, okay.&nbsp; It also just happens to have
stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a staggering 93 weeks,
which is still the record for a novel.&nbsp; The eggheads may not like
this book, but obviously we readers do.
<p>The story is very loosely derived from the Chambers-Hiss case [see Orrin's
review of&nbsp; <a href="index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/146">Whittaker
Chambers: A Biography</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; (1997)<b>(Sam Tanenhaus)&nbsp; <i>(Grade:
A)</i></b>].&nbsp; An ailing Republican President appoints a controversial
liberal, Robert A. Leffingwell, to be the new Secretary of State.&nbsp;
Conservatives in the Republican Senate mobilize quickly to oppose him,
lead by Orrin Knox, the senior Senator from Illinois, and Seabright B.
Cooley, a crusty old South Carolinian, for whom the battle is personal
due to past run-ins with the nominee.&nbsp; The Majority Leader, Robert
Munson, seeks to defuse some of the tension in the confirmation hearings
by forming a select committee and putting young Brigham Anderson of Utah
in charge.&nbsp; Anderson is one of the Senate's rising stars, thoughtful,
decent and well liked.
<p>Many Senators are disturbed by Leffingwell's views, which it seems fair
to say lean towards appeasement of the Soviet Union.&nbsp; But what really
blows the lid off of the hearings is the testimony of a government bureaucrat,
Herbert Gelman,&nbsp; that he, Leffingwell and a man named James Morton
were part of a nascent Communist cell at the University of Chicago some
years before.&nbsp; Leffingwell is able to show that Gelman has had several
nervous breakdowns and, since no one can find the mysterious Mr. Morton,
the nominee manages to plausibly deny the story, though he must lie to
the Senate in so doing.
<p>Things really turn ugly when Morton approaches Brig Anderson to confirm
Gelman's story and Anderson puts Leffingwell's confirmation on hold.&nbsp;
The President, who turns out to be completely unscrupulous, recruits a
demagogic Democrat named Fred Van Ackerman, and they use an unfortunate
incident from Anderson's past to try and blackmail him.&nbsp; The elders
of the Republican Party try to help Anderson out, including the benevolent
but seemingly lightweight Vice President, Harley Hudson.&nbsp;&nbsp; The
mounting tension begins to claim victims and a stunning string of events
concludes the book, leaving the country with a new President and a new
Secretary of State on the eve of a summit with the Russians.
<p>All of this is vastly entertaining.&nbsp; The political machinations
and the high stakes of the game make for great drama, as we've seen in
real life hearings ranging from the House Un-American Activities Committee
to Watergate to Clarence Thomas to the recent unpleasantness with President
Clinton.&nbsp; What's really surprising is how few previous books had been
set in Washington, D.C. Perhaps the only great prior novel of Washington
was Henry Adams's <u>Democracy</u>).; the two best American political novels
<u>All
the King's Men</u> (see <a href="index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/898">Orrin's
review</a>) and <u>The Last Hurrah</u>, had been set in Louisiana and Boston
respectively.&nbsp; This is mostly indicative of what a backwater the Capital
was until the New Deal, WW II and the Cold War.&nbsp; But Drury, who covered
the Senate for papers like <u>The New York Times</u>, clearly loved the
whole Washington scene and his fascination with and affection for institutions,
politicians and politics itself are apparent on every page.
<p>Drury was a conservative himself and the book was apparently intended
to both warn against a too lenient foreign policy approach to Communism
and to demonstrate that Liberals were just as likely as anti-Communists
to practice McCarthyism.&nbsp; But his personal politics never deteriorate
into axe grinding and the heroes and villains are drawn about equally from
the opposite sides of the aisle.&nbsp; And there are heroes here, what's
more there are politicians--in the most naked sense of the word--who are
heroes; men who fight hammer and tongs for what they believe in, without
going over the line.&nbsp; The intervening forty years have reduced us
to the point where we seem unable to acknowledge the possibility that these
men actually believe in what they are doing, but as you read the book you
realize how little politics has changed and how likely it is that the opponents
in our real life dramas are acting, at least in part, out of personal conviction.
<p>The one sentiment, though, that emerges most strongly from the story
is Drury's faith in the resilience of the American system itself.&nbsp;&nbsp;
At the end of the story, just as at the end of Watergate or Zippergate,
there's a sense that the ingeniously balanced institutions of our government
will quickly shrug the whole thing off.&nbsp; In this sense, the book is
unabashedly optimistic and patriotic.&nbsp; It's old-fashioned and corny
and I loved it.
<p>(N.B.--we just <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0055728">watched the
movie</a> too and it is also terrific)<p>Grade: A</p><div class="feedflare">
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